Stuff

This morning’s YouGov poll for the Sun also had their latest European election voting intention figures. The topline figures continue to show Labour and UKIP battling it out for first place, with the Conservatives off in third – CON 22%, LAB 30%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 27%, GREEN 6%.

By my reckoning on a uniform swing this would translate into 15 seats for the Conservatives (down 11), 25 seats for Labour (up 12), 5 seats for the Lib Dems (down 6), 21 seats for UKIP (up 8), 1 seat for the Greens (down one) – the BNP look almost certain to lose their two seats. Full tabs are here.

There are two new Scottish independence polls in today’s papers – ICM for Scotland on Sunday, and Survation for the Sunday Post, both conducted just after the SNP’s conference last weekend (though as ever, correlation should not necessarily imply causality.)

ICM in the Scotland on Sunday has topline figures of YES 39%(nc), NO 42%(-4). Getting rid of the don’t knows brings us to YES 48%, NO 52% – leaving aside the SNP commissioned poll with leading questions last year, this is the highest level of YES support recorded so far.

Note that there was a slight shift in ICM’s methodology from last time – rather than just weighting those with a declared 2011 recalled vote to the correct proportions of the 2011 vote, they are now also weighting the sample so the correct proportion of the sample claim to have voted in 2011. This should have the result of increasing the proportion of won’t votes and don’t knows, but won’t necessarily have any impact on the proportions of YES and NO.

The second poll for Survation has topline figures of YES 38%(+1), NO 46%(-1). Without don’t knows the YES vote is at 45%. This is a slight move towards YES since Survation’s previous poll a week and a half ago, but looking more widely it’s more of a “no change” poll, Survation also showed YES on 45% in March and February.

No YouGov/Sunday Times poll tomorrow because of the Friday bank holiday, but there is an ICM European election poll in the Sunday Telegraph and a couple of Scottish polls.

The ICM European poll has voting intentions of CON 22%, LAB 30%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 27%. Labour first, UKIP a close second, the Conservatives in third is the same sort of pattern that Survation, ComRes, YouGov and TNS have all been showing… but is a contrast to ICM’s European poll for the Guardian earlier this week that had Labour six points higher, UKIP seven points lower. The difference is this one was conducted online, the ICM/Guardian poll by telephone.

The two Scottish polls are a new ICM for the Scotland on Sunday and a new Survation Scottish poll. I haven’t seen figures for either yet, so I’ll update tomorrow.

Survation also have another constituency poll done for Alan Bown, this time for Eastleigh, where UKIP came a close second in the by-election last year. Westminster voting intention in the Eastleigh poll stands at CON 28%, LAB 12%, LDEM 27%, UKIP 32% – which would certainly be a turnup for the books. It also asked about the borough elections in Eastleigh next month, and found local election voting intentions of CON 23%, LAB 9%, LDEM 40%, UKIP 27%.

A couple of weeks ago someone sent me a link to a “poll” in the Tab (which, one understands, is some form of newspaper for students) that claimed to show Conservatives were in the lead amongst students. Nonsense of course, it was an open access voodoo poll with no attempt to get a meaningful or representative sample (hell, 10% of the sample were Cambridge students!). Of course, it was only a poll in a campus newspaper so I didn’t bother writing rude things about it, the only other media I found foolish enough to cite it were Vice and Breitbart.

Just for the record though, today’s Independent has a properly conducted poll of students by YouthSight (we’ve met them here before, under the name of Opinionpanel). This was a panel based survey amongst undergraduate full-time students, recruited via UCAS and validated through an ac.uk email address, weighted by type of university (Russell, pre-1992, post-1992, specialist), year of study and gender. In contrast to the voodoo poll above, it shows Labour with a solid lead amongst students who say they are likely to vote – Labour 43%, Conservatives 24%, Lib Dems 6%, Greens 14%, UKIP 5%. Compare and contrast.